


existent

by PoeticallyIrritating



Series: Femslash February Ficlets 2015 [1]
Category: The Good Wife (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 07:44:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3282461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoeticallyIrritating/pseuds/PoeticallyIrritating
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kalinda doesn't seem real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	existent

**Author's Note:**

> Set in some nebulous post-3x21 space. 
> 
> Kicking off femfeb with a pairing & show I've never written for before! Thanks to Sam/sharkfights for reassuring me on the characterization front. Also [on tumblr](http://sapphicscience.tumblr.com/post/109962016948/existent-a-lana-kalinda-fanfiction).

Sometimes Kalinda doesn’t even kiss her. It makes Lana feel like a cheap hooker, kind of, even if she’s met enough hookers to know that girls who won’t kiss don’t exist outside of _Pretty Woman._ Instead: Kalinda unbuttons Lana’s shirt and presses her against a wall in her apartment, as if this space is not Lana’s but hers. She murmurs something meaningless, a seductive nothing-phrase that lends the situation a sheen of unreality; she’s all hot breath on Lana’s neck, hip grinding slow insistent pressure between Lana’s legs, and Lana isn’t sure if either of them has thought this through.

Well, maybe Kalinda has. But Lana can’t convince herself that Kalinda the manipulator is not, in some way, a construction. She turns over terrified-Kalinda in her mind, sometimes, watery eyes and hands that trembled against Lana’s skin.

Lana was shot once. Her mentor turned serious and protective, like it had gone through her chest, but really it was just a graze—bled like hell though, and she was transfixed for a moment on the warehouse floor, watching her dark shirt soak darker. She was a rookie and she had been feeling, in the most predictable response to having been an FBI agent for all of eight weeks, kind of invincible. Later she worried the bandages with her fingers, pressing hard against the wound, the pain an aching reminder.

Thinking of Kalinda scared feels like that, like reminding your body how to bleed. Only the memory feels less like weakness and more like the upper hand. 

She wonders if she’ll ever stop thinking of Kalinda as an adversary, and sometimes, when Kalinda is warm and slow, tracing Lana’s skin with her fingertips, she wants to. Then Kalinda breathes, “I need you to back off this case” as Lana is coming down, flushed, more delirious than she’d like, and she remembers that there is no such thing as a mutual surrender.

The trouble is—well, there’s a lot of trouble, isn’t there. But mostly, the trouble is that she _likes_ Kalinda, in the casual way of chance coffee-shop meetings, in a way separate from the overwrought drama of seducing and being seduced. Liking Kalinda is complicated, because Kalinda doesn’t seem to exist—because _Kalinda Sharma_ and associated records read like an assumed identity and that means, in Lana’s experience, something bad. And sure, Lana has some bad shit in her past (“Don’t we all?” she tosses off when anyone looks too hard at her paperwork) but not change-your-identity kind of bad. Lana knows how to be dangerous—can craft danger, can make herself threatening with a gun and a glance—but Kalinda seems to be so by nature, to have the sense of it thrumming under her skin.

Again: maybe not. Maybe Kalinda doesn’t even exist; maybe it’s useless to feel— _well._ The point is, maybe Kalinda isn’t real.

Scarier: maybe she is. Maybe they are one, the Kalinda murmuring honeyed words laced with something vicious and the Kalinda with a frantic hummingbird-heart shuddering behind her ribs. Maybe…

It’s easy to lose herself like this, leaning in half-dressed suspended animation against the bed while Kalinda buttons her blouse, draws up the zipper of her boots. Sex is an act of attentiveness for Lana in a way it seems not to be for Kalinda; she is all precision and response, cataloguing: the tender skin just below Kalinda’s ear, the spot along her hipbone that startles her into a gasp, the scar under her ribs that turned her rigid and cold the one time Lana touched it. Lana is used to the _after_ being comfortable exhaustion, mouths slow on salty skin, but Kalinda doesn’t take to languor well. Her activity draws Lana reluctantly from bed to watch as she dresses and scans the room, hawklike.

It goes like this: She finds nothing useful. She makes some careful adjustments to her eye makeup in the bathroom mirror. She leaves. Sometimes she comes back to the bedroom to purr something in Lana’s ear, draw her mouth hot along the line of her jaw, bite down with slow deliberate force on her lower lip.

Other times, she disappears into the kitchen and never comes back. The click of the closing door leaves Lana in frozen silence, hyperaware of the perfume lingering in the air. She inhales, and her skin flushes warm again, her heartbeat thudding in her ears.

**Author's Note:**

> Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed!


End file.
